Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold talk about ‘The Childhood of a Leader’ and Robert Pattinson

Brady, you’re making your directorial debut with your next project, “The Childhood of a Leader” starring Robert Pattinson. What inspired you to want to direct? Were you inspired by Mona? BC: Mona’s nodding her head like, “Yes, that’s right Brady. It was me. It was me.”MF: [Laughs]BC: No, what’s actually stranger is that I didn’t attempt to do it sooner. And it’s strange that I kept acting as long as I did because for years I kept threatening to walk away and do something else. But the reason I never did walk away and do something else was I kept having opportunities to work with people I really liked and really loved. I was like, “Ok, I love your work. Absolutely I can spare a week, I can spare a month.” I’ve worked for some people that I would have been happy to come wash their floors on set for a week just to see how they work, much less to have the relationship that an actor and a director get to have with one another, which is very special and sometimes very intimate, very unique. I’ve found every filmmaker I’ve worked with inspiring, Mona included.

One of the big problems with this project is that it summarized all the things I’ve really been interested in in my personal and creative life. And yet for so many years I just thought it was too grand and too ambitious to ever get made.
MF: And it almost did.BC: And it almost did [laughs]. The film takes place in 1919, it stars a child, it’s in French and English. Luckily it’s not going to be four-and-a-half hours long and it’s not going to be black-and-white. But that’s it. It’s not a very easy pitch. It’s sort of about the birth of a megalomaniac and with a maniacal sort of ego at the turn of the century. It’s about the birth of fascism that occurred during the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

Has the identity of this character been revealed?
BC: I have intentionally not revealed the identity of the character. And it’s a funny thing because it’s not for the reasons that people think. One thing I will happily tell everybody is that the character is not Hitler [laughs]. And the character is not Mussolini. It’s someone else. And there’s the dramatic event where you learn who this person is and that’s something I want to save for people. Robert Pattinson is not playing Hitler as you now know [laughs]. I’ll go on the record saying that.